The "Polar Vortex" Media Winter
Same type of underperforming weather we experienced last week. They use the over-hyped phrase again. Yes, we had some snow. No, it's not melting much. The herd and pets seem to remain unbothered...
Hi,
Thanks again for being here and opening this. For being part of this community.
Too many emails? Too few? Go here to adjust your settings.
Farming News - Well, we’re feeding bales — a month ahead of schedule. And another month’s worth ready if we still need it in the forecasted warm February upcoming.
Writing News - At least I found that cover template. But I’m fascinated by this new book, so it’s a toss-up what I’ll get done this next week.
Fiction News - The Hooman Saga continues. Sue arrives in the valley. Two new characters introduced.
Expectancy Factor - The writing work above has me re-examining the classics - prep work for the book after the one I’m working on.
Farming News
The dire predictors are at it again. This time, three nights of single-digit cold, but without hardly a whisper of snow or ice. We just have to say tuned. And prepare.
It means I get back onto the wood harvesting again. We’ve eaten through all that Ash I’d stocked up. So I have my eye on another dead Ash in the front yard, plus an Oak that fell over a couple of years ago and should be well-seasoned by now. Today and Friday are to be well above freezing, so that will be a good time for it.
Yesterday, though, I spent catching up on writing. (More on that below.)
I haven’t been able to work in yet another newsletter to my schedule, so the solution is to just keep talking about the farm on this one. Perhaps augmenting it with audio or video. And probably extracting the content to a separate file, but not sending that out to the current newsletter on it’s own. If the audio/video works out, this will be a nice podcast to produce as well.
Once the format for all this is working, then we’ll be on our way. (But the devile is in the details — and Man plans while God laughs.)
The discipline I want to get into is in going through “5 Acres and Independence” book and updating that book one chapter at a time. Adding in material on permaculture gardening, plus prepping.
Cows are doing fine. And thanks for asking.
I drive down there everyday to check on Andy and the herd. My two-decade-old pickup truck has 4-wheel drive and enough room to carry everything I need. Plus, it has a semi-heated cab, which at least keeps me out of the weather for that the trip down and back. So my mattock for chopping ice, a spare battery in case one runs low out there, more feed mix for Andy, as well as any treats to train the cows with. Plus any fencing supplies I don’t already have stockpiled on site.
Before I get into the truck, I swath myself in layers to stay warm other wise. A space suit of sorts.
Andy now lets me pet him as long as he’s eating his daily rations. It’s taken awhile to get him up to that point. But he knows I’m his food and water source, so he puts up with me.
A lot of the older cows will let me scratch them where they can’t reach, so that’s it’s own reward. I did get some out of date bread from another farmer. And found that a few of them really liked it. Of course, it ran out quickly. But now those few are coming up to sniff my hands and see if I brought them anything.
These trips happen twice a day. Morning (after I get around (after writing, breakfast, and having coffee with my wife) and Evening, with about an hour of daylight left so I can have time to see if I need to get any cows back in after escaping.
Tiny Home News
The original planning was for three of these. One for her, one for me, and one for us. She loves to cook, and I love her cooking. But that tiny space just proves her genius. Next up, as I’ve mentioned, is a summer kitchen about double the size of this one, a pole-barn with a concrete floor, but still tiny.
For me, I have another trailer that only needs a window replaced and some outside paint. Because that’s for my writing, nothing fancy (yes, you’ll get pix once I start working on it in earnest.) For now, I keep writing in my old office where I’ve been working all along. Only I’m trying to pack things up, so its got containers stacked up, waiting to go to storage - with anything that won’t fit in my writing trailer or that I can’t sell or donate or trash.
The third will be awhile. Technically, there’s enough space in her summer kitchen when that gets built. I’d imagined three 8x16 cabins on wheels originally. But the story about these is interestingly found in my book “Death by Marketing”. And once our summer kitchen is all outfitted and fixed up, then we’ll have a full house to build right next to it. (Plans for that are currently 24x40, which is nominally a tiny home, again.)
For now, we’re getting ready for this next extreme cold snap (people in the Upper Middle West would object to that description - they get much worse than us.) Today and tomorrow are warmish, so it’s time to get out and get our wood stocked up again. Two nearby dead trees are in my sights…
Writing News
Those paperback covers are still hanging fire. Last time I worked on these in earnest was before Christmas, as I discovered.
Busy, I guess. Didn’t get to them this week, again. Maybe I’ll have enough time coming up this week with all the inside-time due to cold.
This week found me again succumbing to my temptation of that new book once again. I’ve cobbled the bulk of it together during yesterday’s cold, and woke up this morning writing the first chapter in my mind. (That’s my alarm clock.) It usually goes off about 4am, and then I burrow down and turn over a few times. To no avail. I’m up by 5:30, usually and then write for two hours before breakfast.
The current draft has some 12 sections and over 70K words, over 200 pages (which will be bigger in print). I try to keep my books at least 50K to make the print version respectable size on the shelves.
After distilling over twelve-hundred pages of research into Campbell, Harris, and Swain, it’s come right along. The breakthrough was narrowing down all they covered into just what had been missing from other books. The stuff that astonished me — that I had read nowhere else — is the driving force of this.
Through this, I’m using Campbell to re-vamp Campbell - it’s own test.
RIght now, I’m on the hunt for something Swain first said. He was intrigued after taking only an abbreviated summer session of courses in how it helped him. And in years later, the friends he’d met there had found their own successes in routinely selling their work to magazines and as books. He’d seen virtual beginners turned into selling writers in a very short period of time - something that it takes most other authors a couple or more decades.
That’s my own inspiration for this book — to write better and sell more.
Once I’d gotten Campbell’s out-of-print books through a library loan program, and OCR’d them into readable and study-able texts, then I knew I had a gold mine. Because Campbell alone told me approaches no one else had used - and has the proof in the success of his students. Getting Harris’ and Swain’s books just put the cherry on the whipped cream of that sundae.
It’s been distilled down to a couple hundred pages. Next is to boil that down into 2200-word lessons for each chapter. And that’s something taught in these books - how to write to length. Sure, you can learn it on your own, as I did - but now, I’m using their age-old formula (known to the Greeks) along with their 80-year old instructions now brought back to life.
Yes, you’ll see these here. I plan on getting at least one lesson written and posted here every week. Of course, I’ll probably stockpile them as my speed picks up. But figure that I’ll give you a beta-edition first and link to it, plus a TOC of the lessons as I go. And there should be audio for this as well.
Plenty to do.
And being cramped inside during winter is a perfect time to get all this done.
And the wheel keeps turning.
A new paperback by spring, I figure.
Also published this week (ICYMI):
Writerpreneur Guideposts
Book Marketing Breakthrough 08 - Where To From Here?
Now, you can take all this and do something with it. Change your life. Change the world. Make things better for you, your family, the people you know. And help the people who need what you know.
This eight lesson completes an 8-part mini-course covering the eight elements of getting your book marketed. There is a supplementary lesson, which shows up in the course proper - but is a very short-handed summary of the mechanics a writerpreneur uses. Here, we see the principle elements of the other 7 lessons all assembled…
.
Fiction Posts
The Hooman Saga - XII - Serial Fiction
SOO-SHE TROTTED IN the middle of the exhausted hunter-pack of wolves as they came down the hill into the valley. Sentient female hunters came behind them. They kept up the trot until they were in a clearing under a large oak tree, where the wolves laid down.
Sue and her protective wolf-pack hunting party have now arrived, exhausted, at the protected sentient valley. Sue meets a white-gray female wolf known as Teacher, who has powers of her own…
(If you can’t wait to see how this comes out, Here’s the book link to get your copy.)
Expectancy Tips
In my “copious” spare time, I’m using the model of re-vamping above to start piecing together that “Expectancy Factor” book — at least in some recessed corner of my mind. I have to retrace my steps through all the various self-help material I’ve covered to boil only what gets remarkable results down to a publishable book and its course.
Earl Nightingale and J. B. Jones already did this with Nap Hill’s stuff - who himself got his materal from Wallace Wattles and Charles F. Haanel, who got theirs from Thomas Troward and his one student Genevieve Behrend.
Lots of work. And I’ve republished what I could of these, making them available online in the book distributors and my own site (store.livingsensical.com). Yes, that’s some reading for your own frigid days inside. All I’ll do it to boil these down to common elements and principles, then organize them into a sensible, memorable, and remarkable (sharable) format.
Easy-peasy.
Probably this summer.
Thanks for being there, opening this.
Sharing is caring. You’re who I do this all for. I value your input.
Leave a comment if something strikes your fancy.
I hope your life is not too interesting to be overwhelming, but sufficiently engaging to keep you amused. (Like some of us here...)
Robert
PS. Again, you can always email me about anything.
PPS. Again, do upgrade to the paid newsletter version. That helps me keep the lights on - so I can keep all this coming to you. As much or little as you want… And you can always buy me a coffee…